Legal

February 7, 2025 Published by South Alberta Chapter - By Dana Hagg

Bill 30: Yesterday’s “Red Tape” Becomes Today’s Consumer Protection

From the Winter 2025 issue of the CCI South Alberta CCI Review

On November 28, 2024, Alberta lawmakers passed Bill 30, the Service Alberta Statutes Amendment Act, 2024. Bill 30 sets the stage for the long-awaited tribunal for condominium disputes. Bill 30 will take effect on a date yet to be determined. These amendments – or at least, what is known of the amendments to date – were recently summarized by Katy Campbell in A First Look at Bill 30: Exciting New Legislative Changes for the Condo Community (13 November 2024) for the Canadian Condominium Institute, who advocated for many of the reforms, including the creation of a tribunal. Condo owners will be able to resolve their disputes more quickly and cheaply, while reducing demand on Alberta’s overburdened court system. This is an exciting and positive development.

Bill 30 also makes sensible improvements and clarifications to condominium governance, including to changes to voting procedures for ordinary resolutions, allowing chargebacks to be treated as contributions (subject to the bylaws), and protecting condo board members against civil liability for errors and damages caused while acting on the condo’s behalf. (The original version of Bill 30 had a fairly significant drafting error in the voting provisions, which was corrected during debate in the Legislature.)

All of this is good news.

It is also very good news that Bill 30 includes a requirement that newly-built condos undergo a “technical analysis” (a.k.a. technical audit), to enable early identification of construction defects.

But it would be even better news if Bill 30 had specified some basic requirements for that analysis – who prepares it? Do they have to be qualified at all?

A good starting point for the new “technical analysis” requirements would have been the former requirements for the “building assessment reports,” which used to apply to new condos before the enactment of Bill 48, the Red Tape Reduction Implementation Act, 2020 (No. 2). Before Bill 48, new condominium buildings required a “building assessment report.” In legislative debate, the MLA for Calgary-Falconridge (the Hon. Devinder Toor) described these reports as “useless.” The official rationale was that an independent expert report provides no better information than a municipal inspection. The Bill’s sponsor, the Hon. Grant Hunter (Taber-Warner) advertised it as “another smart regulation change” that would save four hundred dollars for each new condo buyer.

He described the building assessment report as “duplicative” and asserted that it does not “provide any value”, stating: “Time is money. Time waits for no one. Lost time is never found again. Time is the most valuable thing a person can spend. These are just some of the sayings that describe the value of time. Red tape is a silent robber of time… Getting rid of these reports reduces costs for home builders and frees them up to do what they do best, build communities and create jobs for Albertans.” The Building Industry & Land Development (BILD) Association of Alberta celebrated on its website that it successfully lobbied for this amendment on behalf of the residential construction industry.

Clearly, the government has had a recent change of heart. In November 2024, the Hon. Dale Nally (St. Albert-Morinville) described Bill 30’s technical audit requirement as serving the “well-being” of new condominium buyers:

[Bill 30 would] enhance consumer protection by requiring a technical analysis of condominiums after construction is completed, which would support condominiums in their warranty claims and provide condominium board owners with information about the overall state of their condominium. Over 18 per cent of Albertans live in condos. This bill addresses their concerns and well-being.

Only four years ago, lawmakers described this form of “consumer protection” as “useless” and “duplicative” – as mere “red tape”.

The new condominium reforms are laudable. But Bill 30’s “technical audits” are a correction, not an improvement.

Dana Hagg, HMC Lawyers LLP